The Red Elite and its doimination of American politics

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Don't worry I ain't 100% on all of this.

For those in America this is an organization made up of wealthy donors, politicians big and small and conservative thinkers that right now has immense domination over the Republican party and the country. If we do not take action against this group we risk seeing the erosion of our freedoms before our eyes. And this is not conspiracy talk, for I have every bit of evidence to back this up.

Let's look at the 2012 election, the people voted overwhelmingly Democratic, yet the Republicans retained the house despite more people voting for the other party. In this instance the will of the majority was thwarted in favor of what a few state legislators and the donors who put them in office had decided. This is absolutely unfair, the very core definition of Democracy is rule by the people, if that is ignored than their is no democracy.

To give you another example take a look at South Carolina. But if you look closer what you will is a scary lack of representation for African Americans. In 2016 40% of the people their voted Democratic. Yet only 20% of the seats their are awarded to our party, where the hell is the other 20% I ask. But's nowhere and its absolutely shocking to hear. In congress we now live in a system where a large percentage of populations in southern states have no voice in the system. Its deplorable absolutely deplorable."

The reason for this is because of the Red Elite I did mention. In 2010 and election after election the Democrats were outspent by Republican donors like the Koch brothers by hundreds of millions and as a result they were able to take congress and state legislatures everywhere. And look where its got us we now have a system of legalized oppression throughout the country and a president who is indifferent to it.

In 2011 Governor, Scott Walker took drastic action against the state employees and got rid of their ability to bargain for decent pay. Effectively state employees now were held in bondage by the jobs they had. A teacher paid below the median income now then found their income sliced in half and they could do nothing about it."

But of course whilst that was happening Scott Walker rewarded his cronies, Diane Hendricks and John Menard were Walker's top donors before his 2010 election. Both people were incredibly wealthy and gave Walker millions of dollars for his campaign. As a result, Diane Hendricks no longer had to pay a dime in income tax and Menard faced large tax breaks amounting to millions. Meanwhile state employees were absolutely gutted. Since that is the case, we have to ask ourselves do we the people really have the power in this day and age?

Not even close to 100%. Democrats do worse for the simple fact that all their votes are concentrated in small geographic areas, it doesn't matter that they win 90% of some urban area when a plurality is all that is needed. The US does not have proportional representation, it's FPTP so you have to have a dispersed base of support. A lot of Democrat seats are mandated(1965 Civil Rights Act) minority-majority seats and minorities tend live close together in urban areas so to claim gerrymandering when that's all they want to do for themselves really carries no merit. This goes both ways as there are many Republican voters with no representation in Democratic districts too but there is nothing insidious about it beyond your typical politics.

You have no idea what you are talking about with Wisconsin, teachers did not see their median incomes sliced in half or any of that nonsense. Only the most ignorant foreigner would ever say Wisconsin state employees are 'held in bondage', it was an extreme going the other way with public workers using taxpayer money to bargain against the taxpayers with legislators that that were elected by their unions and that is effectively what Walker ended. Now the state doesn't collect their dues for them, now they actually have to represent their workers instead of a bloated ideological union leadership and predictably a lot of workers aren't so enthused about their leadership.

The whole Koch brother thing is so old, you have to find a new Republican boogeyman. Those guys didn't even really support Trump you know? There is no equivalent to Democrat puppetmaster George Soros at this point whose fingers are in everything across multiple continents.

Wasn't sure if this was going to be about Republicans or communists...

I think all legislatures should be elected using one of these systems:

- Proportional representation (ideally STV)
- Mixed member systems (ideally AV+)
- One chamber elected on FPTP variants (ideally AV) and the other elected on a proportional variant (ideally STV)

That maximises the amount of power that people have while also making it harder for demagogues to gain power.

As Jacoby said, Democrat majorities are very concentrated ... here is a 2016 election country map ...

Such concentration means Democrats will lose overall in all the local elections (House, Senate, judges, state houses, govenorships ...)

Let me give you another example. You know Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Senator. In the Obama administration he pledged to support a bill being passed to tackle climate. However immediately afterwards donors withdrew support for him and the media slammed him immensely. He as a result had to backtrack and vote against the very bill he pledged to support. This I think highlights the level of control donors have over the Republican party since you literally can't reach over and join the other side as a result without losing your career.

Republicans don't seem to want democracy, if we had a true democracy the Republicans would never win a national election with the way they are and they would be a permanent minority in congress. There is a reason they argue to save the electors college or to continue giving 2 senators to states that have only a tiny fraction of the population of other states. There is also a reason why Republicans refuse to investigate Trump's ties to Russia or their meddling in our election. The only conclusion this leaves me is that they don't like democracy. A corporate plutocracy seems to be their preferred method of governing.

Oh, I forgot to mention their nation wide voter suppression efforts.

We have not finished feeling the full effects of Citizens United. I suspect we have barely even started.

This thread got rather absurd very quickly. The Liberal-Democrats always blaming every single problem on Conservative-Republics and everyone else but themselves is also becoming ridiculously old, not to mention that it is a form of class-ism or other form of religious group-persecution, such as disliking a group of sports-fans for not liking the same sports-team, but hey, this is America for you or at the very least American/Western-mentality.

They still have collective bargaining but raises beyond the CPI must be passed by referendum, that isn't really what was controversial about the law which but rather mostly the provision that ends the state withholding union dues from state workers and making the unions do it themselves voluntarily. It's kind of hard to explain but the teacher unions here had came up with a scheme where they owned their choice health insurance company WEA Trust and had made it very hard for districts to negotiate a different carrier, there was a revolving door of taxpayer money funding their political activities where the state would collect dues and the dues would be used to lobby politicians who would then negotiate contracts in their favor starting the cycle anew. Being a state worker in Wisconsin was considered a cushy job.